Costa Rica (2)

I participated in a suspension bridge hiking group in Monteverde. The tour guide introduced us a lot of knowledge about Cloudforest. We saw a lot of exotic animals and plants with a telescope along the way. We took a lot of photos with our own mobile phone on the lens of his telescope. Super clear photos. Nature is really amazing. Figure 1: Small caterpillars, eggs laid by tropical frogs, and glass-winged butterflies. Picture 2: Silicone caterpillar, although it looks a bit disgusting, but when you touch it with your hand, it feels the same as silicone products. It is chubby and cute. Figure 3: Green Viper. Figure 4: 2 small toucans, 3 hummingbirds. Figure 5: Large spiders and small insects. Figure 7: Various poisonous mushrooms. Figure 8: 1 hot lips (also known as Angelina Jolie lips). Figure 9: 2 fish tail leaves.

Hummingbirds attracted to drink honey water, slow motion.

The suspension bridge group also climbed a tree hole, and then made a zipline. The longest zipline is one and a half kilometers. But the most exciting thing is the Tyson swing. At the beginning, as soon as the foot is stepped out, it falls freely, similar to bungee jumping.

Going for a hike in Santa Elena Park, when I entered the park to buy a ticket, I decided to hike with the little girl next to me. The little girl is French, and she has been exchanged at a university in Madrid, Spain for one or two years, and she is very good at English and Spanish. I majored in law at university, focusing on non-profit organization law, war law, and human rights law. It takes her five years to study law, and she has to do an internship before she can officially work after passing the bar exam. She has been saving money since last summer vacation to travel to Costa Rica, because she is very interested in all kinds of animals and plants. She also became a full vegetarian six years ago out of animal rights protection and environmental protection reasons. Afterwards, halfway between the two of us, we ran into an uncle from Columbia, who showed us the photos he took with his mobile phone.

Hiking in the sea of clouds in the rainforest with occasional drizzle has a special flavor. The three or four hours of hiking trails are extremely quiet, and generally only the sound of wind blowing leaves and birdsong can be heard. Halfway on the way, I saw a small white thing on the ground from a distance, and I thought who threw the plastic waste here, but when I got closer, it was actually an extremely thick and slowly moving meat worm.

As the age grows, the frequency of staying in youth hostels is getting lower and lower. It is not because most of the people who live in youth hostels are around 20 years old and much younger than me, but because most of the time the journey is tiring and they don’t want to spend energy. Chatting with the people in the youth hostel, I would rather spend a little more money for a clean place where I can have my own separate space and have a good rest. A few days before I came to Monteverde, I stayed in a hotel alone for several days. Apart from chatting with the owners of two family hotels, I didn’t meet any new friends during the trip. In order to find a balance, I booked a youth hostel in Monteverde, maybe I can meet interesting new friends.

The youth hostel I booked was called Paco House. I remembered that the Spanish teacher of the second foreign language in college was called Paco, and the dialogue characters in the textbooks were all Paco y Pepe or something. This youth hostel is on the street corner at the edge of the town center. From the outside, there is no obvious sign of the youth hostel, just like the home of ordinary locals. When I arrived on Monday, I saw an old man slowly coming over to open the door for me from outside the door. The old man's name is Paco, and this is his home. The hostess immediately came out to receive me in the living room and asked me to write down my name and passport number. I accidentally saw a Chinese name on the top line of the big book, and the passport number was also Chinese. I thought it was a bit interesting, because it is rare to meet Chinese tourists when traveling in Latin America, and there are very few tourists of any Asian descent. The hostess took me into the room, and there was only one other girl inside. After chatting for a while, she was sure that she was also Chinese and could speak Chinese, so we started chatting in Chinese.

This girl is not a few years older than me. After chatting for a while, I found that she has a similar background and experience to mine. Her undergraduate and master's degree are all English majors in China. She said that she also wanted to go abroad to study in graduate school, but her family's economic conditions did not allow it. After graduating from graduate school, I have been working as a Chinese-English translator of patent law in a law firm in Beijing for seven years. The salary is good but it is very boring. After 15 years of naked resignation, I fell into confusion. Introduced by a friend, I chose to go to India when I left China for the first time, and participated in a meditation and yoga course for more than a week. Since then, I have given up eating meat and become a vegetarian who only eats fish. That experience greatly changed her life trajectory. In 2016, she went to India for the second time to attend a one-month yoga class. After that, I went to Barcelona, Spain to study business and live for three years. At the beginning of 2020, I went to play with my friends in Uruguay, and then flew to Mexico for a trip. Unexpectedly, the domestic epidemic broke out and the country was closed. money. She has been in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and other countries for a long time ranging from three months to a year. No wonder she is dressed in Latin America and has a tanned complexion. Before she went to Brazil, she also learned Brazilian Portuguese online. When she arrived, the locals thought she was a local who had lived there for a long time. She said that she particularly likes the culture of Latin American countries. If she wants to, she should be able to black out in a certain Latin American country first, and then obtain the legal qualification for long-term residence in a few years. She said that she was tired of eating Latin American food in the past two years, so she just bought a lot of Chinese ingredients from the Chinese supermarket in the capital San Jose and cooked them by herself. We chatted a lot that first night about travel, foreign language learning and how travel has changed us. She said that she used to have a low self-esteem in China, and cared a lot about other people's eyes and opinions, but now she has become very confident, and she doesn't feel that she is older, and instead lives a much more exciting and happy life than when she was in her twenties. I really enjoy my current life, and I feel the same way. I added this girl's official account, and her official account name has something to do with rats, so I'll call her Sister Shushu. I heard Sister Shushu tell a lot of stories about living in Latin America, especially her dating experience with local brothers and sisters in various countries. The ups and downs of the plot are particularly exciting.

In addition to this very interesting Chinese girl living in Latin America, this family hostel is also an atypical hostel, which is different from the ones I have stayed in before. This youth hostel is the home of grandfather Paco, his son Mario and his son's girlfriend Seidi. There is also a puppy and a big pig in his home. When Seidi told me where the toilet was, I suddenly saw a huge monster on the ground outside the door of the toilet. Seidi said don’t be afraid, this is their pet pig peppa, and it only eats, sleeps and eats here every day. This is the first time I have heard of keeping pet pigs indoors. Later, I heard from Sister Shushu that when they bought this pig a few years ago, it was too small. They were deceived into saying that it was a pet pig that would not grow up, but gradually the pig grew bigger and fatter. They have been raised for several years and have feelings, and it is impossible to kill them, eat them or give them up, so they have been raised all the time.

The hostess Seidi is 53 years old this year. She has three children. The oldest is 38 years old. Mario, who has been with her for seven years, is only 39 years old. The two run a youth hostel together. Seeing them happy, age really doesn’t matter. . Later I learned that Mario was not Paco's biological son, he was adopted. When they are not busy, they will watch TV and chat in the small living room as soon as they enter the door. Sister Shushu and I sometimes sit there with them. Sister Shushu is very good at speaking Spanish. I spend most of my time sitting there practicing my listening comprehension. Sometimes I interject a few words and ask questions.

It is actually the off-season of the winter rainy season in Costa Rica, and there are not many tourists, so only me and Ms. Shushu lived here in the past two or three days, and there was no one else. They have 18 beds in five rooms for guest accommodation. But recently they are renovating and expanding, and plan to build several single rooms with better conditions with their own toilets, so that they can have better income. Mario talked about the high operating costs of running a youth hostel (water and electricity grid fees, commercial garbage collection fees, various local government taxes, intermediary service fees for hotel booking website Booking, and the cost of free breakfast included), but it is actually not profitable. How much is it. If it was only for making money, they would not choose to be a youth hostel. The reason why they choose to be a youth hostel is because they love and like to meet tourists from different countries with different cultures. Hearing what he said, I learned that hotel booking websites like Booking will charge the hotel an intermediary service fee of about 15%. If they don’t book online and pay directly to the hotel, they can earn more money that they should have received. In the future, if it is the off-season and you don't have to worry about the hotels being fully booked, I should do this. I would rather the locals earn the money they deserve for 100%. Seidi rants about some of the best guests we've had in the past. I feel that it is really not easy for them to run a family youth hostel.

The four walls and even the ceiling of his living room are covered with the names of tourists from all over the world who lived here. We only saw a Chinese name. Mario gave me and Sister Shushu a small brush and paint, and asked us to paint Write your name on the wall. It may be because it is off-season and they are decorating the house, they only opened one or two rooms for tourists to live in, and it just happened that Sister Shushu and I are rare Chinese tourists, and even rarer ones who can speak Spanish Chinese tourists, on the second day of staying here, Mario said that Seidi would cook for us to eat at night, because Sister Shushu gave up meat, and they specially bought fish to make traditional food for us: a plate of rice, fish, tomato, Fried pancakes and patacones fried large plantain chips. Sister Shushu also opened a can for us to eat with the old godmother that San Jose bought a few days ago. She bought a big watermelon every day for the past two days and everyone ate it together. It's a pity that Mario took his father to the clinic that night and didn't come back to eat with us before dinner. The three pictures on the far right of the picture below are the breakfasts that Seidi made in the past three days. They are common gallo pinto boiled beans and rice. Can you tell that the bananas are almost gone? Ha ha. She also baked a cake for me on the third afternoon.

On the morning of the third day, Sister Shushu left for the next stop. I originally booked another single-room hotel not far from this youth hostel, because I had to give online tutoring lessons in the evening. When talking to Seidi, she looked a little disappointed, she said that you are here alone tonight, there are no other guests, and there will be no noise. You can have classes in the living room and stay for another night. I really didn't know that I was alone tonight, and I was afraid of disturbing them watching TV in the living room, but since she said so, I didn't refuse and canceled the other hotel. They have fewer guests in the off-season, so I can stay one more day to pay them the room fee and spend one more day with them. I am also very happy. Last night they offered to cook for the two of us, and I was so grateful to them that I decided to cook them a meal the third night. However, considering the limited raw materials, tutoring at night and not much time left, I finally decided to find an easy-to-make stewed tomato and egg noodles for them. His eggs are almost gone, and there are no other ingredients except garlic. I went to the supermarket to buy raw materials before it rained in the afternoon. Except for tomatoes and eggs, other raw materials are substitutes: I didn’t have Chinese noodles, so I bought pasta; I didn’t have authentic Chinese soy sauce, so I bought a small bottle of salsa china, see the ingredients list If you have soybeans, you can buy them; if you don’t have shallots, you can only buy huge green onions. In the evening, I cut what should be cut in advance, and I started to do it after an hour of rest before the two classes of tutoring. Because their house is undergoing major renovations, the normal kitchen can no longer be used, so a temporary small stove was built. The space is not very big, so we made do with it. They also have no cooking oil, all use solid lard. Cook the pasta for a few more minutes to soften it, otherwise it will be too hard. They really like to eat, but they are happy and have been thanking me for cooking for them. There is a little stew left, they can cook some noodles and eat it another day.

Say goodbye to them this morning and head off to the next stop. When parting, they were somewhat reluctant. They treated the guests so sincerely, just like their own relatives. Before they left, they also said that the house will definitely be renovated in a few months, and I am welcome to come back to live at any time. I will miss them.